Labour has raised the white flag on free schools. It's just going to re-brand them 'parent-led academies'

Labour will say that parents should be allowed to set up their own schools provided that there is a strong demand for places in their area. Photo: PA

I sympathise with Stephen Twigg, the shadow education secretary. From the moment he was appointed, he made it clear that he doesn't oppose free schools. I suspect that his attitude towards them in private is the same as Andrew Adonis's and, like his close colleague, he believes Labour should take credit for them. As Adonis has often pointed out, free schools are just a subset of the sponsored academies introduced by Labour.

But Twigg cannot simply embrace the policy without alienating the teaching unions and large sections his own party. Ed Miliband dismissed free schools as "the opposite of the thing we need" and Ed Balls, Labour's last education secretary, described the policy as the most socially divisive in 60 years. So Twigg needs to sugar the pill if he's to persuade the party to swallow the policy.

If this is a "U-turn", it's not a policy shift on Twigg's part. Rather, the new development is that the Blairite Twigg has finally persuaded his largely Brownite party to accept his position on free schools. He's done his best to create the impression that a great gulf exists between this policy and that of the Conservatives, but the truth is that the majority of free schools are already in areas where there's a basic need for more school places, thanks in part to the last government's open-door immigration policy. In principle, the Department for Education will still approve a free school application if the proposer group can show that there's a genuine demand for places, but the number of proposals being approved in areas where there's already a surplus of places is getting smaller and smaller. Of the proposals for mainstream free schools approved last month, over 90 per cent were in areas where there's a shortage of places.

What about non-qualified teachers? Twigg has always been opposed to free schools employing teachers without the union-approved credentials, but that's not just a freedom enjoyed by schools like the one I co-founded. Independent schools and academies have the same latitude. Is Labour going to force them to sack non-qualified teachers as well? It looks as though Twigg wants this to be the main dividing line between the two parties when it comes to education policy in the run-up to the next election and Labour's internal polling suggests that, on this issue, the public is on its side. But I find it difficult to take seriously because I can't see how a Labour government could enforce such a policy. The autonomy of free schools and academies when it comes to things like employing staff is guaranteed in their funding agreements and it's hard for an Education Secretary to override those agreements, as Ed Balls discovered when he unsuccessfully tried to force academies to teach the National Curriculum in 2007. A new Labour government could pass legislation making it illegal for schools to employ non-qualified staff, but any school that sacked a teacher as a result of this law could almost certainly be challenged in the European Court of Human Rights.

My reading of this element in Stephen Twigg's speech is that it's a sop to the teaching unions – and the left of his own party – designed to neuter their opposition to Labour's support for free schools and will be quietly dropped if the party wins the next election. For that reason, defenders of Michael Gove's education reforms shouldn't be drawn into a debate on this point. Instead, they should welcome the shadow education secretary's success in persuading his party to drop its opposition to free schools and taunt Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and the leaders of the teaching unions about this at every opportunity: "So you're opposed to free schools, but in favour of parent-led academies. Can you tell me what the difference is, please?"

In the public debate about free schools, both internally and externally, the enemies of promise have been trounced.